I've Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter To My Daughter
(Hardback)

In the tradition of Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me, acclaimed novelist David Chariandy's latest is an intimate and profoundly beautiful meditation on the politics of race today When a moment of quietly ignored bigotry prompted his three-year-old daughter to ask `what... happened?', David Chariandy began wondering how to discuss with his children the politics of race. Today, in a newly heated era of struggle and divisions, he has completed a letter to his now thirteen-year-old daughter. The son of Black and South Asian migrants from Trinidad, David draws upon his personal and ancestral past, including his experiences growing up as a `visible minority' within the land of his birth, as well as the legacies of slavery, indenture and immigration. In sharing with his daughter his own story of `race', he hopes to cultivate within her a sense of identity that balances the painful truths of the past and present with hopeful possibilities for a better future. With intimacy, sensitivity and beauty, Chariandy shares the questions he is addressing to his daughter - questions of immense importance and resonance for us all.Read more

Awards, Reviews & Star Ratings

NZ Review

A brilliant, powerful elegy from a living brother to a lost one, yet pulsing with rhythm, and beating with life -- Praise for 'Brother', Marlon James, Man Booker Prize-winning author of 'A Brief History of Seven Killings' I love this novel. Riveting, composed, charged with feeling, Brother surrounds us with music and aspiration, fidelity and beauty -- Praise for 'Brother', Madeleine Thien, author of Man Booker Prize-shortlisted novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing Mesmerizing. Poetic. Achingly soulful -- Lawrence Hill, author of 'The Book of Negroes'

Author's Bio

David Chariandy grew up in Toronto and lives and teaches in Vancouver. He is the author of the novels Soucouyant and Brother, and the nonfiction work I've Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My Daughter. In 2019, he won Yale's Windham-Campbell Prize in fiction.